Do men die younger because they’re busy impressing the ladies?

A new study suggests that males die younger than females, on average, because they spend so much energy trying to impress said females.

Hey ladies! (ctoverdrive/Flickr photo)

OK … we’re talking about a study of houbara bustards here. But don’t click away yet – the researchers have some ideas how this same finding might also apply to humans.

Across the entire animal kingdom, males generally die earlier than their female counterparts. If you press them on the issue, scientists don’t really know why. You know the old saying: “Women are from Venus, men are just plain dumb.” Yeah, I don’t know it either – but is it true? A quick scan through the Darwin Awards list and you’ll see a disproportionate number of men did stupid things to remove themselves from the gene pool.

But back to the houbara bustards – which, if you didn’t know, are big birds from the Middle East that have exuberant courtship displays. As Wired reports, scientists at France’s University of Burgundy have found a correlation between lifespan and energy spent trying to win over the ladies.

“It is the males that invest most effort into extravagant sexual display that experience this spermatogenic ‘burn-out’ at an earlier age,” the researchers, led by biologist Brian Preston, wrote in this week’s Ecology Letters journal – according to Wired, since I don’t have a subscription.

The houbara can spend up to 18 hours a day, during mating season, doing its courtship dance. The males puff up their ornate feathers and run around for a while, often circling something like a rock or a bush. Check it out – here’s a video.

If doing this mating dance takes so much energy as to significantly shorten the male houbara’s lifespan, I can only imagine how a man’s courtship strategy tires him out. As a member of the male sex, I am aware of the extravagant displays – and the accompanying mental stress – we humans endure to attract a woman.

But I’m just speculating. The researchers, meanwhile, wrote their feelings on men and their shorter lifespans. From Wired again:

While the findings do support an evolutionary trend toward sacrificing long-term health for short-term benefit, “Another possibility is that there’s more than one way to have a successful reproductive life, by playing either the short or the long game,” said Preston. “It’s possible that less gaudy males enjoy more limited reproductive success but do so over a longer period of time.”

Reproductive imperatives and metabolic consequences might follow the same rules in Houbara bustards as in humans, among whom female life expectancy tends to be significantly longer.

“Humans are not under the same intensity of sexual selection that Houbara males are,” said Preston, “but it’s a tantalizing possibility that similar patterns may occur.”

So, men, if you just hole up in your parents’ basement and play Xbox your entire life, instead of talking to girls, will you live longer? Anyone up for a real-life experiment?